* Posts by streaky

1743 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2010

Encryption backdoors? It's an ongoing dialogue, say anti-terror bods

streaky

Re: What could be done to counteract terrorist groups

The fallout of which lead to the Brexit vote

This is amusing and massively untrue. Nobody voted for Brexit because of Syrian refugees. They may have voted for Brexit due to the EU being paralysed in the face of them but those numbers are low. People voted for Brexit because the EU is the EU and nothing more need be said.

streaky

Re: The answer

Like, the BND are up to their necks in US-led mass surveillance and Russia is.... Russia. Open source for security tech but it has to be funded by... somebody.. or you get clamav type tooling.

Speaking in Tech: Testing data center fire snuffer and... and pow! I just s$%t my pants

streaky

Loud Noises

I doubt it's loud noise causing a failure, more likely to be the pressure differential and it is extremely common with fire suppression systems in datacenters, it happens literally all the time.

People always reference the Seimens testing when discussing failures caused by suppression systems which blames the noise but testing generally only shows temporary reversible performance degradation.

Sorry Nanny, e-cigs have 'no serious side-effects' – researchers

streaky
Pirate

Re: Looking for an excuse to regulate (tax) them

If that was true they'd already be doing it. There's three different government types in this: there's the South American tobacco grower type who will lose GDP if people actually give up smoking, then there's the EU type where they'll do whatever the pharmaceutical companies say because they want to keep their revenues and the EU thinking that's completely normal and fair and last there's the UK type who are running policy off the (self-contradictory) ASH play book.

None of it is any use though luckily in the UK we have PHE doing what they can in the face of insanity being argued from a position of ignorance.

Ad flog Plus: Adblock Plus now an advertising network, takes cash to broker web banners

streaky

They're offering companies the ability to pay them to not block their ads. We used to call this racketeering..

Hello, Star Trek? 25th Century here: It's time to move on

streaky
Coffee/keyboard

Quark

"runs a strip bar in Deep Space Nine"

This triggered me because untruth and I didn't even like DS9...

Inside our three-month effort to attend Apple's iPhone 7 launch party

streaky
Linux

'Reg will be around long after Apple are consigned to bankruptcy court, maybe Bill Gates won't save them next time.

We know who you are, Apple.

When Irish eyes are filing: Ireland to appeal Europe's $15bn Apple tax claw-back

streaky

Re: What if taxation is inherently unjust?

Strange place we got to in society where the definition of avoidance has been changed to not include the word "evade".

My thing, fwiw, was to point out the fundamental falw in the EU model where one state can offer up absurd rates that hack away at the economies of other states and then those same other states having to pick up the bill when it all goes wrong.

€22.5 billion from the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM),

€22.5 billion from the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and bilateral loans from the Euro non-member states United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden

€22.5 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Just throwing that out there.

streaky

Re: What if taxation is inherently unjust?

Just to.. y'know..

All this nonsense for a massive 5500 Apple employees in Ireland; and most of those probably aren't even Irish and many of them will be low-skilled jobs (I know a couple of people who work at Apple in Cork so I know what kind of work they're doing). I really don't see what the country gets out of the deal.

streaky

Re: What if taxation is inherently unjust?

That's an oxymoron

No, it isn't. One state is sponsoring tax evasion in other states. And as I said then the other states have to bail out that state because they're running enormous budget deficits because they're not charging these companies who are costing them money, by the way, the tax that even they say they charge corporations.

It's a something-moron but it isn't an oxymoron. As I said nobody is even taking Ireland to task on this (they should be though) - just simply that it's anticompetitive for companies in their own state.

Ireland had a rating of A+ from S&P and AAA from Moody's, with outlooks varying from Stable to Positive.

Educate yourself

I'm educated plenty, thanks. Is it really not established in the zeitgeist that the ratings agencies, especially Moody's/S&P, have no idea what they're doing?

streaky

Re: What if taxation is inherently unjust?

So I could not care who, how and when offered this rate it walks like a form of illegal state aid, it quacks like a form of illegal state aid, it is a state aid.

It walks and quacks like state sponsored tax evasion. Which might even be fine if the rest of Europe wasn't bailing out that state with emergency loans because the markets won't lend them cash at a rate they can afford because their economy is completely fucked. I don't get how nobody has tied this together yet.

As I stated on twitter earlier, if they won't collect on the bill their bailout loans should be recalled.

streaky

Re: What if taxation is inherently unjust?

It's not a question of taxation or if it's just or not. It's a question of it's not the tax rate offered to every other company that runs cash through Ireland. It's a competition question. Faster the Irish figure this one out the better for all concerned.

It's not even a case of Ireland's actual tax rate being unfair to the rest of the EU despite other countries have to pick up the costs of Apple doing business in their countries (although it should be) it's that the Apple tax rates miss the mark on fundamental issues of competitiveness. It's not even a question of the fact that what is going on being massive tax evasion. It's just simply that Apple isn't paying even Ireland's tax rate and that isn't on offer to me if I start up a business there.

BT boils over, blows off Steam, accuses Valve of patent infringement

streaky
Mushroom

Re: A perfect example of why software patents aren't allowed

There's always at least one BT employee on the 'reg comments downvoting my posts. I see you :)

But no seriously I don't see how they have a case. As I said it's not even a case of US v UK patent systems here, they're nonsense even by the US standards on inevntiveness.

Some of the patents discussed include massively inefficient ways of transmitting data that we were doing better than even at the time of filing; much less the kind of systems valve probably uses now.

I don't get it and every time I look at the patents I SMH. That said I commonly SMH when I look at software patents and recall how things were just the done thing at the time.

streaky
WTF?

Re: A perfect example of why software patents aren't allowed

They look utterly trivial for the state of the art at the time they were filed. Forget software patents versus not: they don't even look patentable even by US patent standards. Plus I can't imagine a way in which they're related to Valve anyway.

Another reason to burn BT to the ground - they're patent trolls.

Props to Valve for ignoring communications with these guys.

Londoner jailed after refusing to unlock his mobile phones

streaky

Re: Petty crime

But plea bargains are illegal here

Steady on a little bit. If you were even close to being aware just how broken the US plea bargain system is you wouldn't even be joking about this stuff. It's heavily corruptive of the very idea of criminal justice.

Yeah in the end the guy is saving everybody money but he hasn't committed an actual crime against a person (natural or otherwise) as far as the police are claiming so there's leeway. With that in mind nobody can really claim is sentence is anything but hefty. I'm not in any way suggesting his sentence should be lighter but if you kill somebody because you're driving and sending text messages you get less time for death by dangerous. Perspective is all I'm saying.

The US system is plead guilty to stealing 10k USD and get 3 months or get 40 life sentences type stuff (and I'm not exaggerating at all).

streaky

Re: Petty crime

I would say he made a limited attempt to contest the RIPA stuff because he was screwed anyway. I've never seen a case (unfortunately) where an essentially innocent (looking) party has fought back.

California to put all your power-hungry PCs on a low carb(on) diet

streaky

Re: I wonder what they're planning to break

Cloud computing is the 900 pound energy hog

Now I have a problem with cloud being the saviour of humanity it's always claimed to be - but if anything it should be reducing power requirements of computation. Because it's all in one place doesn't mean it's using more power for work done which is what energy standards should actually be based on. Mind you that would probably result in us using ARM for everything so lets pretend I didn't say anything.

Non-volatile MRAM coming to servers in early 2017

streaky

Take of the e

.. and add ing. Just saying 'reg. Just saying :)

Cacheing :p

Oh yeah and is it end times for BBUs on raid cards? \o/

Don't want to vote for Clinton or Trump? How about this woman who says Wi-Fi melts kids' brains?

streaky

Re: herd immunity

Somebody has never heard of herd immunity. There are actually genuinely good reasons for specific people not to get vaccinations, so you need to hit another % of vaccinated population or the entire system breaks down and you end up killing the people who through no fault of their own can't be vaccinated. Personally I think it should be an executable offence but I'm old fashioned like that.

There's a lot of very nasty diseases out there that we're lucky in the west to be able to be vaccinated against safely, relatively cheaply and efficiently. People taking that for granted drive me wild.

streaky
Boffin

Uhm

because it's very hard to study this stuff

It's 2016 and we're still claiming things that are very easy to study are actually very difficult.

In the EU we got vaping (gas chromatography and, y'know, mountains of research into carcinogens/poisins/toxins in vitro and in vivo), and apparently in the US they got WiFi because it's not like anything like MRI or basic cognitive testing of any sort was ever invented or anything.

If WiFi was damaging to brains (or in fact the opposite of reality where kids are getting smarter because despite falling funding pretty much globally we're as a species getting better at education) it'd be really obvious in the available data.

It's fine being against things that are essentially good but at least present a shred of evidence.

Reminder: IE, Edge, Outlook etc still cough up your Windows, VPN credentials to strangers

streaky

Re: Ouch

Strictly speaking it's why protocols tend to use nonces not salts (though technically speaking they're the same thing in some ways they work differently and are used for different purposes). Salts prevent dictionary attacks and nonces stop the hash being used in different contexts.

streaky

Re: Screw you Redmond

The solution is to disable msft browsers sending these requests or as somebody else noted blocking smb from leaving the local network at the firewall.

streaky

Re: Windows for Warships won't work without it

I wonder is samba is affected too

It's affected by the fact that the protocol itself is shitty on unsecured (see: WAN) networks, the actual issue is a browser specific bug completely unrelated to SMB itself.

streaky
Alien

Re: Response time?

Given that each version is supposedly written from the ground up, and yet the same flaws continue to exist in each verion, my answer is one.

Because they write these bugs in intentionally to support old things and keep customers - they're worried that if they make they make their OS actually secure but break people's software that relies on these bugs that those customers might just start fresh. I think that's unreasonable and also have serious concerns about anybody who actually relies on a flaw like this; but I don't work for microsoft.

Intel and AMD do the same thing with CPUs - once a bug exists it tends to stay around unless it's completely game breaking. Problem is a lot of Microsoft's are isues in security context and they still keep them around. Itanium was supposed to be a clean sweep of historical bugs that people rely on but we all know how that went - don't think Microsoft would ever try to emulate that unfortunate failure :)

Also in my earlier comment I was supposed to write "hash of your MSFT account password".

streaky

Re: Windows for Warships won't work without it

I'd assume it's purely for backwards compat reasons, possibly even with samba.

streaky

Re: Response time?

although not considered a serious problem, it was something that should have been fixed

Well it's a bigger issue than ever now because of the tie in between your MSFT account and the desktop. Now it splurges the hash of your MSFT account hash over the internet for all to see and that's, y'know, risky.

Uber: Why we use MySQL

streaky

MySQL's replication isn't the only available replication in the MySQL ecosystem though. So, erm, oops.

Harrison Ford's leg, in the Star Wars film, with the Millennium Falcon door

streaky

Re: Good job..

so I suspect not relevant to HSE regulations

Doesn't sound like a safe system of work to me, of course it's "relevant" - it's a serious injury (arguably worse than Ford's) in the work place. It's literally why the HSE exists.

streaky

Good job..

Nobody told the HSE about JJ Abrams (claiming, at least) to have broken his spine in the same incident.

UK membership of Council of Europe has implications for data protection after Brexit

streaky

Re: Out means out

Don't Brits deserve to have their human rights protected?

Because why is the ECHR nescessary to do that. The UK literally invented human rights and due process.

No mention of the ECHR or any other international convention or organisation.

We'll still be in the Council of Europe post-brexit which requires membership of the ECHR - indeed the ECHR is the Council's court not the EU's. Not taking a position (well not expressing one at least), just relaying fact.

streaky
Mushroom

But..

"if PrivacyShield is deemed adequate for transfers of personal data from the European Union(EU) to the USA"

But it isn't. The only thing that would be adequate is wholesale change of US constitutional law to cover non-US citizens outside the US; which is never going to happen in - even with legislative branch support (which there is none: they think it's hilarious that people outside the US have expectations of a right to privacy. No really, they actually laughed when they were asked about it) - more than 25 years, best case really.

People hiding behind this stuff are ignoring the basics of the issue that brought Safe Harbour crashing down. That the 4th amendment doesn't cover non-US citizens outside the US and that the president has the power to do pretty much whatever he/she(? maybe?) wants even if it did. Corps in the US have zero control over any of this and are in no position to certify, guarantee, prove, attest, swear by anything.

As Caspar Bowden said, the only thing they're really going to understand is stopping the data flows.

I don't think it's even fit for the UK either if we get the kind of law that's been floated recently, there's effectively zero checks and balances in there so..

Failing projects pray blockchain works as 'magic middleware'

streaky

Yep

I've been saying this for some time now, it's a solution looking for a problem and instead of letting it be applied naturally where it makes sense (it genuinely could be a solution to some actual real-world problems) it's going to get shoehorned into a lot of things where it doesn't belong or simply isn't needed.

This would all be fine because Darwin - the issue is a lot of it being floated by government departments and it's going to be money wasted at taxpayer expense.

Ofcom should push for fibre – Ex BT CTO

streaky

Re: Why not wireless?

Why are we investing in cable systems when mobile can offer just as good or in some cases a better connection?

Because it, y'know, can't.

There's isn't a wireless system anywhere at any price that can push 40Gbit at the lowest latency possible. Because you're an outlier doesn't make physical connections the "wrong choice".

What makes what BT is doing the wrong choice is they're not investing (enough) in the right tech at the right time and they're taking huge taxpayer funded windfalls for doing that.

UK.gov digi peeps hunt open source chief

streaky

If..

I planned to stay in London long term (I absolutely don't) I'd be all over this like a rash, sounds like an interesting job.

One in five consumers upgraded to Win10 for free instead of buying a PC

streaky

Re: Once again. We have passed peak PC.

I don't agree but one thing is for sure: people are only going to upgrade hardware when they have a compelling reason to do so which I think is what you're really trying to say.

Cryptocat dev reckons WhatsApp is blocking calls to Saudi numbers

streaky

Do people really..

still think that decompiling Java is anything but trivial to lie about this stuff?

No really though I imagine if it's blocked by the country then it wouldn't be unreasonable to block it in your app just to stop negotiating it and extra load to your gear. That said the sensible thing to do would be to tell people that.

CloudFlare probes mystery interception of site traffic across India

streaky

95% chance it's directly related to..

the idiotic block from 2014 where they blocked access to many sites (declaring an interest: including one of mine) because they were hosting "terrorist material" despite the sites involved a) not doing that and b) the Indian government making no attempt to contact the sites involved.

India doesn't like user generated content and more-so doesn't like user generated content that's arguably legitimately critical of the Indian government.

They went around accusing such terrorist organisations as Github of being, y'know, terrorists and that was that. Don't need to contact the sites explaining the issue or anything. If this isn't in the same vein I'll be amazed.

P.S this sort of blocking never ever ever works.

Use Brexit to save smokers' lives and plug vaping, say peers

streaky

Re: The Brexit cloud

Our government agreed the rules on Vaping via the council of ministers and our elected MEPs then approved it too.

I'm fully aware but the government has shown it can be moved on vaping. EU has proven it is utterly incapable of even discussing the issue. The progress that's been made with the Lords alone has underlined how much even a little public pressure can be brought to bear against the people who listen to ASH and get them to change their opinions to align with reality.

If it was possible to get the commons to agree to discussing it without saying "it's EU law so we can't do anything anyway" (which will be the post brexit outcome) then that same pressure can have an effect. Government departments are already being completely reasonable even in the face of the TPD.

streaky

I make my own eliquid because I can be sure of the quality of the flavours that go into them; I only buy flavours and base liquids I can get datasheets for and frankly that's what sensible regulation would have looked like. If we're all using the same sources for our liquids why do companies who make liquids have to individually go get every flavour at every strength tested to reach the same conclusions. It's illogical on all sorts of levels and completely ignores everything we've learned from science, ever.

The fact the EU completely missed this simple point is the exact problem with the TPD. That and the fact that there's no point in limiting the size of something you can refill (i.e. the tanks) other than just to annoy people.Same with the actual size of liquid bottles you can buy; why in the name of all holy hell not just require that caps are childproof (which *all* manufacturers are doing anyway). You wouldn't limit a bottle of bleach to 20ml so why do it with eliquids.

Also yes it only benefits manufacturers (see: traditional tobacco companies who have been buying those manufacturers) of the kind of ecig that you can buy from your local garage and those things suck if you actually want to quit smoking.

streaky

Re: The Brexit cloud

TPD confirmed to me everything I knew about the EU before and made it absolutely clear that the EU wasn't prepared to discuss anything sensible on any level. One doesn't vote to leave solely for that reason but it cemented my decision in stone.

Trial to store benefits claimants' personal data on blockchain slammed

streaky

Re: Misdirection

Any competently instantiated blockchain should be cryptographically secure.

This is utterly untrue. Blockchain attests data it doesn't secure it against reading (you could crypt the data you push into it though but that would be very unsmart)

Also not for nothing but storing personal data permanently and indestructably (even if it was secured) in a blockchain is obviously illegal in EU and (as it stands today) UK law soooooo...

Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom thinks all websites should be rated – just like movies

streaky

Re: Andrea Leadsom...

It's obviously physically and budgetarily impossible to do this so it's not a real issue. Stuff May thinks is a thing on the other hand..

Dell confirms price rise post Brexit vote as UK pound stumbles

streaky

Re: No Problem...

Not a problem. If you remove the cost of pre-installed Windows 10 you can save approximately 10%, and install Linux instead.

If you buy from elsewhere you can save even more AND get better gear. Wait people still buy dell gear?

Prominent Brit law firm instructed to block Brexit Article 50 trigger

streaky

Re: Bollocks

Where's that then? Israel? (I *think* they operate a fairly pure form of PR. I don't think many, if any, other countries do.)

Uhm. The outcome wouldn't be any different regardless?

Plus not for nothing but PR is insanely bad for democracy. People already cry like babies that we don't elect our PM - imagine a world where you don't elect your MP either. Like we don't have enough problems with politicians who haven't actually worked in their lives.

Also it creates an environment where parties can stack members who agree with them which is incredibly dangerous.

streaky
Boffin

Re: Bollocks

Right or wrong, the process could be tied up in litigation for years

No because Parliament is sovereign to the action either way; they have a debate and any MP in England who wants to get re-elected goes with the vote or they make this nonsense illegal and the courts throw it out. Either way it's a huge fail of the actual intent.

Also not for nothing but it's a constitutional issue and the power in law is held by the crown and loaned to the government vis-a-vis the prime minister. It's a fundamental misreading of UK constitutional law to think otherwise. This stuff isn't even difficult.

Non-natural persons don't get to decide the outcome of votes, natural persons do; the end. We operate a one person one vote system here, the very idea that a few (I'm guessing mostly foreign) corps can control the outcome is offensive to the very idea of democracy and must be stamped out with the maximum of force that the state can bring to bear.

It doesn't pass the laugh test and I can't imagine any court entertaining it for more than 5 minutes (courts AFAIK aren't allowed to control parliamentary business directly regardless) and ignoring all that they need to grow up anyway.

streaky
Facepalm

Re: What a horrible waste of time and money

Constitutional issue which was put to the people by parliament and apparently parliament needs to look at it again because unspecified reasons. We used to call these lolsuits.

Not for nothing but referenda has the same force and effect as general elections - if that result isn't followed we have a name for that. It's amazing how real life makes the NWO nutties look a bit more sane every day.

I do hope the news media is putting some effort into the actual story here and figuring out the shady characters behind this action and also this isn't America so piss off anyway?

Here's how police arrested Lauri Love – and what happened next

streaky

Re: Although the burden of proof lies with Love

It's pretty clear from this as I've stated a bunch of times that the police don't want this tested in court. The law is basically there to scare the ill-informed.

Michael Gove says Britain needs to create its own DARPA

streaky

DSTL still exists which was part of DERA. But yeah it's the kind of thing where smart people would say "privatisation of a good thing that was doing well f**ked us in the ass". Not for nothing but the entire reason it was privatised was down to EU rules so on some levels he's completely right that post-EU we could expand DSTL into areas QQ work but it'd be.. y'know, weird.

Smart thing might be for the govt to aquire QQ if this was going to be a thing - seems like taxpayer would get bent over on that at least inititally though.

GitHub presses big red password reset button after third-party breach

streaky

Browser certs are a joke though. Github supports U2F which has got to be the way forward; I've been using it myself for many months now and it's absolutely rock solid.